What is madness, and who is the subject that embodies it, the mad individual? What are the boundaries of normalcy, and how has it been dialectically constructed alongside the idea of sanity throughout history? What place does the mad subject occupy in society? To contemplate madness and its relationship to space—whether physical or social—it is essential to recognize the ethical and epistemic concepts that define it.
“Biopolitics,” a concept defined by Foucault as the state management of life, perceives the population as beings with specific biological characteristics who coexist and must be regulated to achieve productive efficiency. Biopolitics instrumentalizes human life, caring for useful individuals and abandoning those deemed useless—a principle of modern politics that consolidated under the hegemony of neoliberalism (FOUCAULT, 2004).
